Wellness app subscriptions. Subsidized gym memberships. Childcare. Food subsidies. Flexible working arrangements.
Competitive compensation and benefits like these are fundamental to attracting and retaining top talent, meeting a team’s needs, keeping people engaged, and fostering a healthy working environment.
They’re essential for building loyalty and highlighting a company’s investment in its culture and people-first business strategy.
According to a report from MOBE and HR Dive, benefits done right “can drive business goals like performance and morale, [and] … bolster worker well-being by supporting employees’ physical, mental, and emotional health.”
But are all the benefits you offer serving the needs of your people?
Some benefits might look great on paper, but your people might not need or use them. There are plenty of different examples of employee benefits, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need them.
So how much money is going down the drain on underused benefits? And how can you adapt your benefits to ensure they’ll truly make a difference in your people’s lives, inside and outside work?
The best benefits programs are so much more than a checklist of perks: They’re what can make the difference and enhance every person’s quality of life.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at why in today’s tight economy and labor market, it’s vital to get your benefits right.
Plus, we’ll share some benefits best practices, how to prioritize the employee benefits you offer to achieve the best ROI, and how to spot any underperforming benefits. We’ll wrap up by taking a look at how to replace them with higher-quality, cost-effective options that align with your people’s needs and expectations.
Best practices for rolling out benefits
Encouraging people to take advantage of their benefits is a cornerstone of a healthy company culture. And it starts at the top—from using vacation days and going offline at a reasonable time to using healthcare benefits and food and travel subsidies.
When people see their higher-ups using great company benefits—and actually benefiting from them—they’re likely to follow suit.
But as well as showing, companies also need to tell their people about their benefits. After all, this can help boost the ROI of the benefits for the company, prove they’re a sound investment, and bring about higher engagement and satisfaction levels (not to mention lower burnout rates).
You could even host workshops to show people how to get the most out of their benefits and use them to the fullest.
Another golden rule with benefits is to emphasize how they support your workforce no matter their race, ethnicity, age, or gender.
Certain benefits are tailored to specific demographics, potentially causing others to feel excluded due to a lack of suitable options that are relevant to them.
For example, parental leave supports new parents. It’s a great benefit, but it’s also important to have alternative benefits in place for team members outside that demographic, such as grandparental leave or retirement benefits.
With that in mind, always give people the option to choose benefits that best suit their personal needs and lifestyle from a bank of different benefit options. This autonomy will encourage the uptake of well-suited benefits even more.
What benefits do you currently offer?
Before you can understand the ROI of your benefits, you first need to check that your HR team knows about all the different benefits you offer, and how they might vary by location—this is especially important if your team is globally dispersed.
To gauge your current offerings, speak to your regional HR directors and take an inventory to determine:
- What benefits you offer
- Who those benefits are intended for
- If your benefits offerings differ by location (and if so, how)
What benefits are your people actually using?
Now you know the benefits you currently offer, it’s time to find out the ROI of your investment in people-focused benefits.
How?
The simplest way is to talk to your people directly. This will help you pinpoint what benefits they are using, how these benefits are helping them, and what can be done to encourage them to participate in your benefits program.
To start this process, you can survey your people—or ask line managers to speak to them on your behalf and provide feedback—to determine why the benefits are performing well or not.
Make sure to listen to any ideas that come back from your people, and look for patterns of feedback including:
- Do they know how to access their benefits?
- Do they have suggestions on how to optimize your current benefits offerings?
- Are some benefits causing resentment in other people?
- Which benefits are rarely used?
- And the biggest question—what benefits are missing from your offerings? If so, and if you were to invest in them, what’s the payoff? How will people use them and how often?
Leverage HR tech to easily collate and analyze your data
By now, you’ll have lots of data on what benefits you offer, how your people are using these benefits, and any gaps in your benefits offerings.
But when you don’t know how to manually measure the ROI of different types of benefits, it can be a struggle to get your head around the figures.
Compensation management tools are a great way to get a full overview of your compensation and benefits packages by managing all of your hard data and analyzing it properly to give you actionable insights.
With these tools at your disposal, you can easily identify:
- Underperforming and best-performing benefits
- Which benefits your people are engaging with, and which ones are underused
- Which demographics are using which benefits
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Ramp up your benefits
After researching your best-performing benefits—as well as any gaps or underused benefits and compensation—you’ll be ready to tweak your benefits package to best suit your team’s demographics, needs, and expectations.
Consider rebranding your benefits to kick-start your new offerings, and drum up more excitement—and boost engagement as a result. You can also double down on your efforts by rolling out an awareness campaign to spread the word about the value these new benefits will provide for your people.
Regularly revisit your benefits
Assessing your benefits is a fantastic start. But for your people to get the most out of your benefits and compensation package, you should regularly reassess how effective each of your benefits is.
This involves efforts like checking in with your people to ensure they know which benefits are available to them and educating them on how to access them properly.
This cyclical process not only helps you to stay adaptive to the changing needs of your people—it also allows you to maintain a competitive edge in the tight labor market.
